Non-Acceptance of Islam in the Southern Sudan: The Case of the Dinka from the Pre-Colonial Period to Independence (1956)

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Northern Islamic hegemony, and this paper will concern the centuriesold resistance to Islam by the Dinka people. It has been argued that the swamps of the Southern Sudan formed barriers that completely prevented the penetration of Islam and that there was only a slender link with the northern network of caravan trade.1 Later, the violence of the Islamic Turkiyya and Mahdiyya2 and their sanction of the slave trade was the principal explanation for rejection of Islam by the Southern Sudanese during this period.3 During the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium,4 the most prominent assertion of existing historiography is that the Southern Policy stopped the advance of Islam into the Southern Sudan, from which that region had, until now, been isolated.5 This study holds that the Southern Sudan was never isolated from Islamic exposure and many smaller Southern groups converted to Islam. Southern Policy itself was so short and poorly enforced it did not isolate the south from Islam. Nevertheless, the largest Southern Sudanese group, the Dinka,6 for the most part, ignored Islam politically, culturally and religiously because the Dinka were unable to incorporate Islam politically, socially or religiously into their society. Hence, until independence in 1956, the Dinka neither rejected nor accepted Islam, but rather co-existed beside it.